Interviews

Hive co-creator Ashish Thusoo describes the Big Data challenges Facebook faced and presents solutions in 2 areas: Reduction in the data footprint and CPU utilization. Generating 300 to 400 terabytes per day, they store RC files as blocks, but store as columns within a block to get better compression. He also talks about the current Big Data ecosystem and trends for companies going forward.

In this interview recorded at JavaOne 2011 Conference, Spring Hadoop project lead Costin Leau talks about the current state and upcoming features of Spring Data and Spring Hadoop projects. He also talks about the Caching and Data Grid architecture patterns.

Mark S. Miller talks about the security considerations of JavaScript and how they are dealt with in ECMAScript 5 and the Caja project. He also mentions issues that have to do with HTML5 and compares the security characteristics of other languages like Java and Scheme.

Adrian Cole discusses his jclouds project, which is an open source library that helps Java developers get started in the cloud and reuse their Java development skills. Cole also talks about some of the challenges of creating a cloud agnostic library, such as the use of different hypervisors and that various cloud implementations are written in different languages, such as VB, Python, Ruby, etc.

Stefan Tilkov discusses REST (Representational State Transfer) and RESTful web services based upon work he has done for clients of his consultancy. Stefan talks about the shortcomings of the WS-* specs and says he sees little need for WS-* web services any more. Stefan also talks about how web development frameworks are beginning to map to the RESTful model, and the concept of REST and security.

Billy Newport talks to InfoQ about the need for higher level abstraction to do parallel programming with multi-core systems effectively. The interview explores some approaches taken with MapReduce products such as Cascading and Pig for a Hadoop cluster, explores the limitations of the actor model and message passing, and touches on IBM's WebSphere eXtreme Scale (ObjectGrid) product.